First Play: The Sims 4 Review

No pools no problem? The Sims 4 is finally here just in time for fall. As you know, The Sims franchise always had that rainy-day replay value. Here’s a glimpse inside my first play and impressions of the Sims 4.

It has been 5 years since The Sims 3 so you can say it’s about time. Of course with the exclusion of expansion packs as I don’t buy them unless I can get them for a considerable discount and the user-created content is just more fun.

As with any game when announced, many fans are upset over content/features left out this time around. Honestly, at first glance they did remove staple aspects of the game. Apparently this is for the sake of the new engine/improved performance/increase compatibility with a wider range of computers….yeah. Could you imagine the Sims on the Source or Diesel engines? Either way I like experiencing games for myself than relying on speculation.

For a breakdown of how The Sims 4 differs from The Sims 3 and details on what’s included, check out this Gameranx article:  New Features Available At Launch

Sidebar: I’m still waiting for a truly open-world multiplayer online Sims – and I’m not referring to the flop of all flops…

First Impression
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Loading screens abound!
First load for any game is always the slowest. However, it does start up rather quickly. A major downside is loading screens in-between lots/worlds — gets old pretty quickly and will have you missing the true open-world feel.

Where are my saved Sims from CAS?!
To my surprise — and others I presume — I didn’t see any of my saved Sims from the Create A Sim demo! After fidgeting around, restarting, verifying game cache, etc, I finally got the wise idea to manually import them myself. The process is pretty easy.

Here’s how to manually import your saved sims from The Sims 4 Create A Sim demo:

• Locate your game files — they should be within ‘ My Documents’ in the ‘Electronic Arts’ folder
• Goto the ‘The Sims 4 Create A Sim Demo’ folder and open the ‘Tray’ folder
• Select all the files and copy
• Paste the files into the same ‘Tray’ folder in the ‘The Sims 4’ folder
• Restart the game and your saved Sims should now be in your gallery

Graphics
I will say the graphics are a lot sleeker than its predecessors. The UI is vastly improved and less cumbersome. The compact HUDs allow for more playable on-screen real estate, which is a major plus. The UI does remind me of The Sims Free Play (mobile game) touch friendly grid. The Sims themselves are far more animated and stick to their cartoonish charm. It would be nice if the next major installment took a step towards more realistic looking characters. I wish they would step their game up either way, I’ve run into more issues with this installment than it’s predecessors.

Gameplay
You’ve gotta get started somewhere, so of course after I imported my Sims I made in the Create-a-Sim demo. I figured that would knock out valuable first game time; which it did after troubleshooting. I found the gameplay  smooth and responsive. I didn’t have any problems with lag but I did experience many warnings about high memory usage – and I have 16gbs paired with an Nvidia GTX 660ti with my processor overclocked to about 4.2-ish — so draw from that what you will. Hopefully patches fix up the memory hungry errors. In the meantime, I’ll have to tweak the settings to see if that helps but then again who really wants to lose graphic quality and play the game low res? Disabling Origin in-game helped a bit. I wish I could just load the game itself and not use Origin; or better yet boot from Steam eliminating the clunky Origin software. Oh and I also crashed about three times within the first hour of play, which brings me to my next point.

SAVE YOUR GAME!!!!
This is Sims 101. I should know better by now to hit save periodically but no the newness came over me and I honestly forgot. First crash…lost the progress of my house I built. Can we make auto-save a thing here?

Build Mode
To get started I went straight in and decided to get into the new build mode. Usually, I would just buy a pre-fab house from the game or community and customize it myself. Hearing so much about how easy and less time-consuming the build mode is left me eager to try it. You can literally drag and drop rooms making the process of building more seamless than ever.

Emotions
This is a gift and a curse. I feel like this aspect was definitely put in the forefront and where the devs spent a brunt of their time. Seeing your sim have feelings makes the game as dynamic as you can imagine. Their emotional state — like us — will take a toll on their everyday tasks/interactions. There’s a huge emphasis on emotions/persona and it gets a bit distracting after a while.

Favorite Bits

• Build mode – No more spending hours to complete your house. The menus are organized a lot better and even feature a search bar so you don’t have to go clickity clacking looking for a smoke alarm.
• Multitasking – Sims can juggle more than one task and not be glued/static to one option at a time.

• Legacy settings – EA at least got this part right. You can toggle between the new camera and The Sims 3 camera (CTRL+SHIFT+TAB). I found myself bouncing back and forth but ended up sticking with The Sims 3 cam. You can also select to use the ‘Traditional Social Menu’ – ‘the pie menu that groups options by type rather than contextual relevance’ – do this! The new menus seem highly unorganized and just random!
• Organic interactions – The Sims seem more engaged with one another and less robotic. You can tell they put a ton of work in on the details down to the mannerisms.

  

• Neighborhood autonomy – I know this isn’t really new but I’ll say there is improved autonomy within the neighborhood. Again, this makes the game seem less restricted and psuedo-open world. 

Glitches
I’ve read about glitches some players were having with mutant babies, characters skins loading on top of one another, routing, etc. I only ran in to a fork glitch. My sims’ fork was permanently attached to him until I restarted.

Synopsis
All in all it was enjoyable but nothing to write home about. If you are a Sims fan I think you will be surprised and have a good time. It did feel a bit empty as far as content and I did find myself missing old features but we know the king of expansion DLCs will deliver soon.  Now if I actually buy said DLCs is another thing. Not to mention the Sims community has always been active in creating everything from patches to skins. I’m very interested to see where they take the game next. There are a lot of new things to get used to/learn this time around but I feel once I have the hang of it will get old pretty quick. If you’re on the fence I say wait until a good sale to grab it and stay tuned to game play videos and walk-throughs to gain more insight and not preconceived opinion. At this point I’m cautiously hopeful.

I expected a lot more but was left feeling ok about the experience. As I mentioned, it feels a bit empty at times — like barebones The Sims pre-expansion packs. Of course then it wasn’t a problem because we were just having fun with this new simulation game but after playing the all/seeing how they developed over time — it falls short. I guess this gives us time to get used to the game, complain and they can release patches/updates as needed. Hopefully EA doesn’t hold out on us and release major fixes as pay for play DLCs.

Oh and I managed to do this already… 😆